Snapped cable robs Mango of power

Workers make efforts to fix the cable along Marine Drive and restore power in Mango on Thursday. (Animesh Sengupta)

Mango in Jamshedpur went without power for over 20 hours on Thursday after high-tension cables snapped on Marine Drive in a mishap involving an overloaded truck.

Supply had not been restored even till 10 in the night.

The incident took place at 3am when the truck, while negotiating the road near Larsen and Toubro’s yard, hit a 33KV transmission line of Jharkhand Urja Vikas Nigam Limited (JUVNL) and sped away.

The impact caused two overhead high-tension lines, which connect Mango sub-station with Gamharia power grid, to come apart and fall into Subernarekha that flows along Marine Drive. Although the truck driver and helper escaped electrocution, there could have been casualties had the mishap occurred during daytime.

Soon after the incident, transmission from the Gamharia grid was disrupted and Mango, where 3 lakh people live, plunged into darkness at 3am.

“We woke up this morning to find that there was no power in our area. The inverter also stopped functioning after some time because of the prolonged outage,” said Savita Mandal, a resident of Madhusudan Apartments on Dimna Road.

Several other localities like Zakirnagar, Azadnagar, Subhas Colony, Moon City and residential apartments lining NH-33, which passes through Mango, suffered too.

Many apartments lacking generator facilities had to grapple with water crisis.

“I could not take a bath. Daily household chores also got affected as water could not be pumped to the overhead tanks in the absence of electricity,” said Brajesh Singh, a resident of Old Purulia Road in Mango.

General manager of JUVNL’s Singhbhum unit A.P. Singh said they could not start restoration work immediately because the high-tension cables fell into the river.

“We engaged a private agency for the restoration work at 9am. Our engineers were also rushed to the spot. But as the cables fell in the water, we are having difficulty in retrieving them. A boat has been pressed into action to aid the workers,” Singh told The Telegraph.

This is the second time in six months that power supply was disrupted in a Jamshedpur locality by callous drivers.

In February, a trailer had hit a high-tension electricity pole on Marine Drive in Sonari, causing a similar outage.